US The Powerball jackpot just hit $261 million — here's the best time to buy a ticket, according to math

15:52 03 august 2017

15:52 03 august 2017 Source:
Business Insider

Two winning &dollar;1M Mega Millions tickets bought in NYC and L.I.

Two new millionaires-to-be struck gold with winning lottery tickets bought at convenience stores, lottery officials announced Wednesday. The lucky winners — who have not been identified — bought the &dollar;1 million winning Mega Millions ducats at a 7-Eleven on Stewart Ave. in Hicksville in Nassau County and at a Sweet 14 Candy & Grocery on 14th St. in Manhattan“I've been checking my ticket all day today, it wasn't me. If it was me I wouldn't be here," said Hami Ahmed, 22, who works at the store by Stuyvesant Town.

The Powerball lottery jackpot for Wednesday, August 2 has hit $ 261 million and the winning numbers will be announced just before 11 p.m. EST. Former Business Insider writer Walter Hickey did the math to figure out the best time to buy a ticket .

But basically, when the jackpot hits 351 million , it’ s time to buy tickets . That’ s 2.9 million minutes, or 48,000 hours, or 2025 days… There’ s a lot of math to explore in Powerball . And at TLC, we would also stop to consider the morality of state-sponsored lotteries.

The Powerball lottery jackpot for August 2 has hit $261 million and the winner will be announced just before 11 p.m. EST.

Former Business Insider writer Walter Hickey did the math to figure out the best time to buy a ticket.

Factors to consider include odds of winning and odds of splitting the pot.

The Powerball lottery jackpot has hit a whopping $261 million, and the question on everyone's mind is "At what point should I actually start caring about the Powerball Lottery"?

Answering this question is not so simple, because in addition to calculating the odds of winning a potential jackpot, you also have to figure out the odds that you will have to split the potential jackpot. And the odds of a split change all the time, because the bigger the jackpot, the more people buy tickets. So we've decided to really drill down into the math to combine all the factors, including jackpot size, and the odds you will have to split the pot if you do win.

Lawbreakers or just really lucky? Mass. has more repeat lottery winners than any other state

Over the last six years, four members of the Jaafar family of Watertown have cashed in more than 7,000 winning lottery tickets and collected a cool &dollar;11 million.&nbsp;Statistics suggest it’s nearly impossible to win the lottery that frequently. But Massachusetts has more repeat lottery winners than any other state, people who redeem so many winning tickets that they raise questions about the integrity and oversight of the &dollar;5 billion state lottery, according to an analysis of nearly 11 million lottery records from 34 states conducted by PennLive.com and students from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The Fund for Investigative Journalism supported the project.

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However, if you do play for that glimmer of hope, there are times when it makes more sense to buy a Powerball ticket than others. Hit up the link below for a whole lot of Powerball math .

Powerball is interesting in the sense that there are a number of stagnant cash prizes that you can win, as well as an ever-increasing jackpot.

The expected value of spending $2 on a Powerball ticket is actually -$1.58 when you ignore the jackpot. That's right, the expected value of playing when you ignore the jackpot is negative.

And while the probability that you win the jackpot is outstandingly small — 1 in 175,223,516 to be precise — the jackpots can grow outstandingly big, which makes it so that at some point, you can actually get a positive expected value.

For instance, when we last looked at Powerball the jackpot had reached a whopping $600 million. If you look at it in the most rudimentary form, your expected value for playing Powerball was not only positive but also pretty attractive. Because of the ludicrously high jackpot, people could expect to gain about a $1.78 after playing.

At &dollar;3,684, Average Mayweather–McGregor Ticket Cheaper Than Mayweather–Pacquiao

It will cost you a lot to see Floyd Mayweather fight Conor McGregor on August 26. published on SI.comIt will cost you a lot to see Floyd Mayweather fight Conor McGregor on August 26. On average it may not cost you as much as the vaunted Mayweather–Pacquiao fight, but the fact it’s even close tells you something about the considerable hype for this one.

× According To Math , Here ' s When You Should Buy A Powerball Ticket . The Powerball lottery jackpot has hit a whopping 0 million , and the question on everyone's mind is "At what point should I actually start caring about the Powerball Lottery"?

For the best odds, Aaron Abrams, mathematician from Emory University, tells NPR that you want to wait for a lottery with a very large jackpot The Best Time to Play the Powerball Lottery, According to Math . Playing the lottery is never a good financial investment, seeing as you have better chances

How To Win Mega Millions, Powerball Jackpots?

Powerball jackpot hits 0 million , largest ever in U. S . Saturday' s drawing happens at 10:59 p.m. Eastern time (7:59 p.m. Pacific). You have until 59 minutes beforehand to buy a ticket in many states, or sometimes there' s a two-hour cutoff.

One ticket sold in Indiana wins 5 million Powerball jackpot Feb 23, 2017. The winner made a wager, according to the lottery. Based on Powerball ticket prices, one could conclude that the winner purchased three Chat (Limited Schedule). Premium Features. Buy /Renew Membership.

LottoReport.com keeps an outstanding record of how much each Powerball lottery has taken in over the past two decades. It's remarkable. For pre-January 18, 2012 Powerball lotteries, the amount of money collected is the amount of tickets sold, as they cost only $1 prior to that switch. After January 18, 2012, we merely have to divide the take by two to ascertain the number of tickets bought.

LottoReport also lists the jackpot, in millions, for each lottery.

Combining this dataset with information from Powerball that shows when a lottery was a winner — and how many winners there were – we're able to make this nice plot of lottery participation as a function of Jackpot value. Red dots are lotteries that had a winner:

So we can notice a very, very clear upwards trend. The higher the jackpot, the higher the participation.

Please note that following Powerball's shift to a $2 lottery, the minimum jackpot prize — what the jackpot resets to after paying out a jackpot — has increased from $10 million to $40 million. As a result, any information from below $40,000,000 isn't super relevant here. The advantage, though, it it helps us ascertain people's behavior at the lower bound, which is crucial for a good regression.

Powerball and Mega Millions: What are the odds of winning?

You're much more likely to get hit by lightning or get a hole-in-one than to take home a lottery jackpotJust don't quit your day job quite yet. The odds of winning both jackpots are one in 75 quadrillion -- that's 15 zeros -- according to data scientists at Allstate. You have a better chance of winning just one of the jackpots: a mere one in 290 million for Powerball and one in 258 million for Mega Millions.

Can a large Mega Millions jackpot make the odds good enough that you should buy a ticket ? The expected payout is just the jackpot size multiplied by the probability that at least one ticket would win -- 0.975, in this For Powerball , the best ticket value is for jackpots advertised at about 0 million .

"My boyfriend told me I should stop and buy some Powerball tickets on my way to work because the jackpot was so huge," said Leach. Leach chose to receive her 0.5 million jackpot as a one- time lump sum payment of 7.4 million , rather than an annuity.

What we want to find, looking at this data set, is a formula that will help us predict the estimated number of lottery players given a certain jackpot value. That way, we can calculate the expected value at every single lottery jackpot amount in order to figure out when the expected value says it's worth it to play.

In order to find that formula, we're going to run a linear regression.

A linear regression calculates the line of best fit given all the values.

However, since it appears that the relationship between jackpot size and powerball players may be polynomial — growth accelerates as the jackpot grows — we'll run a second regression that calculates a curve of best fit instead of a line of best fit.

When we ran the linear regression, we found that the line that best fit our sample was the straight line with the formula:

Tickets Sold = 217,629*(Jackpot in Millions) + 5,912,850

So what does this mean? For every additional million you add, an additional 217,629 tickets will be bought. The basic number of tickets bought regardless of the jackpot is 5,912,850. The R2 value tells us that this regression line accounts for about 70% of the correlation between the advertised jackpot and number of tickets bought (simplified).

Mega Millions winning numbers announced for &dollar;393M jackpot

If there's no winner Friday, the next drawing will be Tuesday -- and will likely top &dollar;400 million .There was no winner for Tuesday's Powerball drawing, meaning Saturday's drawing will top &dollar;350 million. There is a one-time cash option for Mega Millions of &dollar;246 million. Tickets are &dollar;1. As for Powerball, there's a one-time cash payout option of &dollar;224 million and tickets are &dollar;2. Even with more options for giant payouts, the odds of winning a jackpot remain abysmal at 1 in 258.9 million for Mega Millions and 1 in 292.2 million for Powerball.

At the moment, The Powerball jackpot has hit 0 million . Here are the probabilities for winning Powerball , according to their official site Your Money Emails & Alerts. Get the best of Business Insider delivered to your inbox every day.

Related Stories. Here ' s what N.J. family that won 9M jackpot is doing with its money May 31, 2017. I hope that one ticket is the only one that matches all 5 numbers plus the Powerball to win the Congratulations to the Smith family. and they did it with a dream. Keep the good times rolling !!!

This one assumes that there is an element of growth at an increasing rate, and accounts for roughly 87% of the correlation. You'll notice that it seems to more accurately convey the participation of large-jackpot lotteries.

So moving forward, we'll look to these two models — the linear and polynomial regressions — as estimates of the rate of participation given a new lottery jackpot amount.

As a result, we can plug in the value of any hypothetical jackpot we want to estimate the number of tickets bought given historical rates of participation in Powerball.

One last thing. This chart that shows the probability that there are multiple winners at a given participation rate. We'll use the participation rates from our regressions to find these probabilities at each jackpot value.

Single ticket sold in Illinois matched all six numbers in Friday's Mega Millions lottery drawing with a jackpot worth &dollar;393 million. Lottery officials said the winning ticket was purchased at Nick's Barbecue in Palos Heights, Illinois, about 20 miles southwest of Chicago.Friday's winning numbers were 23, 33, 53, 56, 58 and the Mega Ball 6. Three other tickets matched the five white balls, taking the second prize. Those tickets were sold in Washington state, Ohio and California, according to a release.The jackpot is worth &dollar;247 million if paid out in cash, or &dollar;393 million in installments.

Powerball lottery heats up with new jackpot of 5 million Jun 4, 2017. One ticket sold in Indiana wins 5 I'm gonna wait for the jackpot a little bit to buy my tickets just for kicks. However, I think the best is yet to come I anticipate a huge jackpot in excess of 0 million later this year.

Buy Powerball tickets online and find out the estimated Powerball jackpot . In this event, we will notify you and advise how best to claim your jackpot winnings! Mega Millions also has a minimum jackpot of million meaning just one Powerball jackpot win will change your life forever – no

By factoring in the third, we can estimate the values of those splits.

Combining in the fourth, we can calculate the expected value of each jackpot, disregarding the rest of the expected value.

And by adding in the fifth, we can get the full expected value for a ticket bought at any advertised jackpot price!

Finally, there's one more step. The vast majority of Jackpot winners prefer to take all the cash up-front, rather than in an annual 30-payment annuity. As a tradeoff for getting the money up front, the winner will have to accept the value of the winnings at a discount.

After some analysis of the estimated winnings, each "advertised" annuity jackpot is roughly 1.8 times larger than the cash-up-front value. We can use this to calculate the estimated cash payout for each advertised lottery.

The next two charts show the estimated value of both the Annuity style-winnings as well as the cash-up front winnings for both the linear and polynomial models of lottery participation.

Here's what it looks like for the linear model of lottery participation:

The expected value for the cash-up front Powerball winnings is always negative. It will never make sense to take the money up front, whether you believe the linear model or the polynomial model.

The expected value for the annuity, however, is break-even when the jackpot exceeds $345 million in the linear participation model and $380 million in the polynomial model. Since the polynomial model seems more accurate at higher jackpots, go with that one.

Taxes will probably mean that it is never profitable or sensible to play the lottery. So if you do play, try to minimize them.

-Walter Hickey published the original version of this article.

Still no Powerball winner, jackpot climbs again

Didn't win the &dollar;393 million Mega Millions jackpot on Friday? A massive Powerball grand prize is still up for grabs. There was yet again no Powerball winner after a drawing Saturday night, so the jackpot will roll over to the next drawing on Wednesday night. Powerball officials estimate the jackpot for the Wednesday drawing at &dollar;430 million.The Powerball prize pool has been building since June 10.One player in Illinois won the Mega Millions jackpot on Friday night.The odds of winning either game are extreme -- one in 292 million for Powerball, and one in 259 million for Mega Millions.

The jackpot win is the first since the newly revamped version of the PowerBall game debuted Jan. 15, according to lottery officials. "I use lottery money all the time to buy more tickets ," Lustig said in 2010. His biggest prize was more than 2,000 in 2002.

Still no Powerball winner, jackpot climbs again .
Didn't win the $393 million Mega Millions jackpot on Friday? A massive Powerball grand prize is still up for grabs. There was yet again no Powerball winner after a drawing Saturday night, so the jackpot will roll over to the next drawing on Wednesday night. Powerball officials estimate the jackpot for the Wednesday drawing at $430 million.The Powerball prize pool has been building since June 10.One player in Illinois won the Mega Millions jackpot on Friday night.The odds of winning either game are extreme -- one in 292 million for Powerball, and one in 259 million for Mega Millions.

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The Powerball jackpot just hit $261 million here's the best time to buy a ticket, according to math

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The Powerball jackpot just hit $ 261 million — here ' s the best time - www.businessinsider.com

The Powerball lottery jackpot for Wednesday, August 2 has hit $ 261 million and the winning numbers will be announced just before 11 p.m. EST. Former Business Insider writer Walter Hickey did the math to figure out the best time to buy a ticket .

Powerball Math | What I Learned Today - wiltoday.wordpress.com

But basically, when the jackpot hits 351 million , it’ s time to buy tickets . That’ s 2.9 million minutes, or 48,000 hours, or 2025 days… There’ s a lot of math to explore in Powerball . And at TLC, we would also stop to consider the morality of state-sponsored lotteries.

palottery.com/pick2 - www.palottery.com

The page you are looking for cannot be found. Error 3759.

The Best Time to Play the Powerball Lottery, According to Math - lifehacker.com

However, if you do play for that glimmer of hope, there are times when it makes more sense to buy a Powerball ticket than others. Hit up the link below for a whole lot of Powerball math .

Here ' s When Math Says You Should Start To Care About Powerball - www.businessinsider.com

× According To Math , Here ' s When You Should Buy A Powerball Ticket . The Powerball lottery jackpot has hit a whopping $400 million , and the question on everyone's mind is "At what point should I actually start caring about the Powerball Lottery"?

For the best odds, Aaron Abrams, mathematician from Emory University, tells NPR that you want to wait for a lottery with a very large jackpot The Best Time to Play the Powerball Lottery, According to Math . Playing the lottery is never a good financial investment, seeing as you have better chances

One ticket sold in Indiana wins $435 million Powerball jackpot Feb 23, 2017. The winner made a $9 wager, according to the lottery. Based on Powerball ticket prices, one could conclude that the winner purchased three Chat (Limited Schedule). Premium Features. Buy /Renew Membership.

Mega Millions and Powerball Odds: Are they ever in your favor? - www.circlemud.org

Can a large Mega Millions jackpot make the odds good enough that you should buy a ticket ? The expected payout is just the jackpot size multiplied by the probability that at least one ticket would win -- 0.975, in this For Powerball , the best ticket value is for jackpots advertised at about $890 million .

"My boyfriend told me I should stop and buy some Powerball tickets on my way to work because the jackpot was so huge," said Leach. Leach chose to receive her $310.5 million jackpot as a one- time lump sum payment of $197.4 million , rather than an annuity.

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